Dallas inventor takes lingerie business online

DALLAS (AP) First she created the TopsyTail, a plastic gizmo girls can use to flip their pony tails inside-out. That was followed by The Halo, a series of dolls and the kissing machine.

Casting about for a new product to sell, Dallas inventor Tomima Edmark hit upon the combination of underwear and the Internet.

''If you put 'lingerie' in an Internet search engine, you get all these sleazy sites that were created by men, for men,'' Edmark says. ''But women buy lingerie for themselves. They buy stuff they can wear.''

Not only is buying bras and panties more mundane than men imagine it, it's frustrating and time-consuming, Edmark says. Women scour racks of ill-fitting, oddly colored and mismatching underwear and often come away with nothing.

Figuring there had to be a better way, Edmark concluded, ''It just screams 'Internet.'''

Edmark used focus-group research before launching HerRoom.com last month, but she also relied on her experiences and those of the dozen women in her once-a-month lunch club. Some retail analysts are skeptical about the lingerie Web site, but Edmark's instincts have certainly served her well over the years.

Take the TopsyTail. While leaving a movie with her mother, Edmark admired a girl who had turned her pony tail inside out. Figuring a tool could perform this task better than her fingers, Edmark went home and crafted a prototype from a circular knitting needle and masking tape. (The 43-year-old married mother of two young girls still sports a pony tail.)

Investing the advance she had earned for writing ''Kissing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know,'' Edmark bought an injection-molding machine and began turning out plastic TopsyTails.

Edmark advertised her invention in hairstyling journals and got a boost when a fashion magazine ran a complimentary blurb. She has since sold 7 million TopsyTails for $5 to $15, allowing her to quit her job as a computer saleswoman for IBM in 1992.

Edmark's next inspiration was The Halo, a wide-brimmed crushable travel hat equipped with foam inserts to protect women from the scourge of hat hair. While not as successful as TopsyTail, The Halo is still on the market too.

Not all of Edmark's ideas made it to market. The Paparazzi Shield, a folding screen that celebrities could use to block their face from photographers, inspired by Princess Diana, never went into production.

The Kissing Machine is no longer for sale. Consisting of wires hooked up to stereo speakers with alligator clips, the device gave kissers a rhythmic tingle when they touched someone holding the other end.

Edmark says she sold 5,000 of them. But after a write-up in Playboy, adventurous amours began attaching the wires to other bodily parts, and Edmark shut down production.

Edmark's treatise on kissing can be traced to graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. The inventions and books gave Edmark the means to put about $500,000 into the lingerie Web site, hiring subcontractors to maintain it and fill orders. HerRoom.com is aimed at practical women in their 30s and 40s because, Edmark says, younger women already have Victoria's Secret.

Analysts say Edmark faces stiff competition from Victoria's Secret, which has both stores and an online shop.